One conventional apparatus for controlling peripheral equipment which is adapted to control, for instance, disc drives comprises a processor for controlling a plurality of disc drives, and a plurality of timers each counting a seek time of a corresponding one of the disc drives.
In operation, a control signal is supplied from the processor to one of the disc drives whereby a head is controlled to move from an original track to a designated track on a recording medium like a magnetic disc or an optical disc so that information is read from the recording medium or written thereinto. In the control of the disc drive, a timer counts a seek time during which the head moves from the original track to the designated track whereby the counted time is compared with a predetermined time. In a case where the head can not seek the designated track in the predetermined time, the processor produces a control signal again to re-control a corresponding disc drive so that the head moves again toward the designated track. When the head can not reach the designated track even after a predetermined number of addressing trials, the disc drive is detected to be "failed".
According to the conventional apparatus for controlling peripheral equipment, however, there has been a disadvantage that the amount of hardware is increased because a plurality of timers are provided independently in each of the disc drives. As a result, the number of disc drives which can be controlled by one semiconductor chip disc controller is limited. Further, means for controlling the plurality of timers becomes vary complicated.